Modern Brides 100 Things We Love features Sticks and Stones!

We are really excited to have Sticks and Stones featured on Modern Bride’s "100 Things We Love" list! The issue just came out, and it will be on newsstands for the next 2 months. Upon seeing we were number 54, I asked the editor, "you mean you could find 53 things you loved more?" She quickly informed me it was in no particular order, lest I be too concerned.

We were consulting for a friend’s startup business the other day who asked, “how do you guys get in national publications?” Honestly, I wish I could answer that question. It’s extremely tough to get national publicity, simply because of the sheer volume of products with which most magazine people are being bombarded.

First of all, you have to know the decision-maker for a particular section of the magazine. If you don't know who that is, your product is going to sit in a big sample closet for months.

If you are able to come up with the name, which in itself is a huge chore, you face a "freeze out":
if you try to call, you never get a return call. If you email, you rarely get a return email. If you try to send them a sample they will say, “Got it. Looks great. If we can fit you in somewhere we’ll try. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

Having a very strong sales background has been crucial for both of us, as we are used to handling and overcoming the inevitable objections you face. It’s tough for even the most seasoned salesperson to hear “no” 50 times in a row, but the ones that make the sale are the ones that make the 51st contact. Having built the brand, we hear “no” a lot less these days, thankfully.

I think our biggest source of luck was the Oprah-Tom and Katie gift, as that gave us credibility. That, coupled with the fact that we were first on the national scene with a unique and brand new product. We started sending to all the national magazines in 2005, and we are just now getting press in some of them! That’s over THREE years of trying to get our product featured. Nowadays, literally every editor of every magazine that fits our demographic - home, gift, parent, lifestyle, etc - has seen the product, so it’s a matter of finding a story or product feature fit. It’s more a matter of our follow-up and perseverance than anything else.

A disappointing thing is that we always think we are going to attract more customers than we actually do when magazines come out. When the magazines arrive, it is always a lot smaller response than we expected. That said, we are always very excited to be in print.

The toughest thing we face going forward is that once a product starts getting a ton of press, media thinks you are overexposed and they aren’t offering anything new to their audience by featuring your product. After all, they think, you’ve already been everywhere. It’s a tough world out in media-land.

The biggest thing it has done for us is accelerate the company growth. It has made a 10 year process take less than 3 years, which has had its challenges in terms of how to handle rapid growth. Overall, it’s been really enjoyable. I thought I knew a lot about business before Sticks and Stones, and I did have some knowledge that has been very helpful. Being in the middle of starting an internet-based product business has taught me things I never thought I’d learn! I wish I could have learned from someone else’s mistakes. Alas, it wasn’t to be....

The Dark Star Oracle

So I went and saw the Dark Star Orchestra the other night on the riverfront. DSO is a phenomenal tribute to the Grateful Dead. Some DeadHeads would slap me, but these guys are actually tighter than the original band. They literally sound better. Again, if you are a DeadHead you will probably take issue with that statement.

The unique thing about DSO is that they don’t just cover the Grateful Dead, they actually perform a single show from the Dead’s massive catalog of live shows. Each member plays the appropriate role and sings on the appropriate songs. They have the two drummers, play all the same instrument parts, and they even have a Donna Jean gal who comes along for the 70’s shows and sings her parts. Every once in a while they’ll throw in an original setlist, but of the four times I’ve seen them they’ve played three full shows, encore and all.

During their shows, the true fans will start narrowing down the era and trying to guess what show they are covering based on their song selection. It’s kind of amazing to watch it happen, as these fans truly know their stuff. They know what songs were “leadoff” songs, what songs were set-enders, what songs are played in the middle of the first set (“Bobby cowboy songs), what type of song they play in the middle of the second set (“we still need a Jerry ballad”). They also know about when certain songs started appearing in the repertoire (“this song wasn’t played until ‘77”). At the end of the show the band will announce the date and venue they just covered. Like “that was from Dec 31, 1978 and Winterland.” People actually place bets on the year, month, venue, etc.

DSO always packs the riverfront, and you basically see the same people at every show. Last Saturday, my friend T-Bone and I decided to have a little fun while watching the show. He has never seen a Grateful Dead concert, nor does he know any of their songs other than probably Touch of Grey and Truckin’. This was his first DSO show, and on the way in I rolled out the plan: he was going to guess the exact show and be a Grateful Dead Oracle. The secret was that I would use my Blackberry and search archive.org, a website with over 2,000 shows. As the songs would roll out, I’d start narrowing down the shows so that by the time we got 4 or 5 songs in, I’d have it pegged.

My DeadHead friends know I’m more of a casual fan. I like the music, saw the Dead live in ’93 once, but I only know about half the songs in a given show. I also read a great biography of the Dead, but that’s another story. So, if I had guessed the show, they would have been on to me, as they know I’m more of a moderate fan. But T-Bone was an unknown entity, an enigma. He has never been to a show with these guys, so as far as they knew he was the biggest Dead fan in the world.

I told him to only make guesses and nod in agreement if they spouted some knowledge. It worked like a charm. In fact, I had never heard the first 2 songs they played, but by song three I had archive narrowed to 5 possible shows. By the fourth song I was almost positive, so I told Bone “say ‘if the next song is Cassidy, I think this is a show from July 1978’. These guys were convinced it was a show from ’73 or ’74, so when Cassidy rolled out we were giddy. From then on, I told him to say things like “I know they played Stella Blue in this set, but it might not be next” just to be less obvious. I also gave him lingo like instead of saying “Scarlet Begonias into Fire on the Mountain” you say “Scarlet >Fire”. You say “they come out of Drums into Not Fade Away” rather than “after Drums they play Not Fade Away”. Subtle nuances like that can give you away as a Dead novice!

He went along predicting song after song flawlessly. The kicker was when he actually called the encore, Werewolves of London. Near the end he finally said “this show is from July 3, 1978 in St. Paul, Minnesota. It was beautiful, and by that time everyone was convinced he was some kind of savant. People were literally stunned at his ability to predict every song in order.

I almost don’t want to see another Dark Star Orchestra show without my trusty Blackberry and my “GD Oracle”! Good times.

Sticks and Stones touted by Rachael Ray

This video is from the day Sticks and Stones was featured on Rachael Ray's "Hurry Up and Dish" segment. We have had the video since the show aired, but we decided not to post it until we had the blog up and running.

As far as press goes, Rachael Ray has been a huge boost for business. We added hundreds of new customers that day, got some really nice feedback from satisfied recipients, and we still continue to reach new customers regularly, even almost a year later.

Our webmaster had worked overnight to get the new website up and running. For about the first 5 minutes after the segment aired on the east coast, we had the old site still up. During the switchover, we forgot to implement our web tracking, which tells us how many visitors we have and where they are coming from, so I was thinking there was still an error, though I could see the website online.


We worked through the kinks, and the segment was phenomenal. It also helped that our product was not a handbag, as you'll see when you watch it. It certainly stood out by being on easels away from the main table, and having them marvel at the value of getting a custom-made piece of art for such a good price was helpful as well.



You can watch it here:

Sticks and Stones on Rachael Ray

First video with our digital camcorder

This is a funny video clip of Allie, Julianna, and Lily getting silly at their grandparents’ house. Let’s just say none of the three are camera shy. They literally spent a couple hours last night just watching themselves on video and laughing as hard the 47th time as they did the first time. We enjoyed just watching them all sit at the table and break out into laughter every two minutes. Even little Lily has figured out how to pull up the folder and double-click the videos she wants to see, so this morning she was sitting in the kitchen watching all of their shenanigans again!

At the very end, Allie starts busting out the opening bars of Handel's Messiah. Who knew?

Enjoy...

The stars aligned

Someone was asking me the other day what the formula was that had caused Sticks and Stones to take off like it did. I hadn’t really thought in depth about it, so my answer was “let me get back with you when I have time to think.” As I started pondering, I came to the realization there have been many different things all working together. While we could have still made a viable business without one or two of these things, we’d be much smaller and what has transpired in three years would have taken ten!

Here are the things that have caused the "stars to align" in our favor....


Sales experience

The first thing is Jera and I both had years of sales experience and personalities that are conducive to selling. This was crucial when it came to representing our company and our products to other people, especially decision-makers in the national media outlets. Some people were given analytical skills, some are nurturing, some have never-ending attention spans and can focus for hours at a time. We were born for sales and marketing. A friend once said to me, “there are thousands of products that never made it off the basement shelf, simply because there was no one to sell them.” We weren’t about to let that happen.


Thinking globally

We also had both worked for companies that either had a global presence (the largest in the industry in my case) or had a global customer base (in Jera’s case). This was important because we realized it’s a big world out there. Had we worked for businesses that were locally operated with a local customer base, it would be much more difficult to envision our product in O Magazine, People, Entrepreneur, etc. Just having that more global outlook was an incredible positive for us. We never saw ourselves becoming “weekend warriors” – people who work all week and then spend their weekends at craft fairs. That is a tough way to make it, as you rarely make up the cost of time and booth fees, plus we valued our relaxation and family time. We also want a basic footprint in boutiques and gift stores, but we knew the business they could offer would be very small simply based on their foot traffic. Today, even with 60 stores, we reach more customers online in a single day than we reach in a week in all of our stores combined. Where would you put your efforts? We also got a really nice response from our local newspaper early on, but again, after a couple days we were old news. So, we went on to the next step…


Blitzing the national media

We set out a plan to blitz the national marketplace in order to set up significant roadblocks for the competition that would surely follow once we started appearing on television and in magazines. To date, I don’t believe there is a stone left unturned in national (millions of readers or viewers) outlets. Because of that, 95% of our customers come directly to the website via our URL rather than a Google search. While we still get a small amount of Google searches daily, it is our presence in the national print and internet media that gets customers to bypass search engines and come right to the website.


Knowing the importance of branding

I mentioned this in an earlier blog, but I’ll point out some really extreme examples of brand development, and you can reduce that down to our little industry. Tissue paper: Kleenex, Inline skates: Rollerblades, Online search: Google, Photocopy: Xerox, Mp3 players: iPod. All of these industries have competitors, but their brands are so powerful they’ve become part of the lexicon. We knew it was crucial to get our brand built early on, and we weren’t willing to compromise the future by making decisions that might make money in the short run but ultimately would dilute our brand effectiveness long term. Had we not had the foresight and concern for branding from the outset, we might be selling $.25 photographs for $5 a pop and shipping them to you in an envelope rather than completed custom-framed personalized keepsakes that are pieces of art and family heirlooms.


Managerial and Leadership background

I was fortunate enough to have years of managerial and leadership experience, which has been really important since we grew to having a number of employees. Learning to deal with different personalities, to set up incentives to motivate specific performance, to look at financial statements and make business decisions based on those statements – all these are acquired skills that I had in my pocket from my days in the corporate world.


Customer service background

Coming from a corporate environment where the customer is always right made the transition to running our own company easy, as we keep the same philosophy at Sticks and Stones. We knew if the owners of the company harbored that philosophy, it couldn’t help but trickle down.


Internet background

Jera worked selling internet advertising and email campaigns starting in 1998, so she was at the forefront of the movement. She also saw the downward trends in both over time. Her knowledge of that industry has saved us thousands of dollars in advertising, as we hardly bother spending on unprofitable pay-per-click (except on our own pages and to keep track of a few others) or buying email lists (a complete waste of money since the clickthrough rates are less than 0.1% these days). We’d never have known that had we not had years of exposure to that industry. When you sell it for a living, you get to see it go into the tank firsthand! And don’t get me started on banner ads…


Having cash for growth

That is something we were very fortunate to have, as we have spent a ton of money simply to grow and to get through the lean times – building, maintaining, and upgrading the website is expensive. Purchasing enough materials to have on hand for customer orders has a cost to it. Paying salaries, rents, and other overhead all costs money, and we weren’t profitable for the first 18 months, so having enough put away to cover all of these necessities was such a blessing.


Having a mentor in the custom framing business

I can’t stress the importance of this to our business success. My friend who owns a very successful custom frame shop has been a cauldron of knowledge. Early on, he was willing to take a smaller profit because he believed in our growth, rather than trying to make his money while he could. When he realized we were outgrowing his shop, rather than getting greedy, he focused on exactly what he does best – make custom frames for people. He not only allowed me to strike out on my own, he encouraged and taught us. Today, he still makes all of our wood frames, and he is able to focus on his strength while making a solid revenue from ours. It’s a win-win.


Having a fantastic programmer on staff

Again, another situation where the stars were aligned. We have one of the best programmers around at our fingertips. You can read about him in an earlier blog, but basically he and Jera have worked together since about 2002. There is a trust that exists between us that is imperative when working with someone so intimately involved in the creation of our “store” in cyberspace. Most people either have a brother-in-law that “dabbles” in programming or they have to bid out their jobs. In our case, Cristian Hotescu was available what seemed to be every hour of the day, 7 days a week early on. He is also extremely talented and knowledgeable in his field.


Not having to go to another job

We were extremely blessed to be able to own our company before Sticks and Stones came along, and we were both full-time employees of the company. That meant we got to set our own schedule, and we both had the time to devote to growing Sticks and Stones when we needed it. I used to have every toll free call come into my cell phone, I answered every email, and one of us would run packages down to the packaging company we used at the time. I can’t imagine trying to run a professional business while working for someone else. It would be almost impossible to justify handling your side business with an employer during the workday, and customer service would suffer.


Last, and probably most important…faith in God

There were stretches early on in our marriage and lives where we had financial and professional success and believed we were self-made. We believed in God but never really cared about living a lifestyle that reflected that belief. God showed us how wrong we had been, as we went through some very scary times. Relatively speaking, we never had to break into any long-term savings, which was a small miracle. However, we saw a number of months where outflows exceeded income, and watching the bank account going backwards to start a business is unsettling. Through it all, we had many signs and answers to prayer that said “keep moving, you’re going in the right direction.” I know many times God will allow a person to go through adversity to get their attention. We were so lucky it wasn’t health-related, as that would be so much harder to handle. However, He got our attention in a big way, and He’s continued to provide for us as we’ve continued to be faithful. I can't imagine trying to run a business without our divine "business partner"!

That’s it, in a nutshell. Thanks for reading all the way through. There are so many exciting things on the horizon that we aren’t even able to talk about yet. Look for our personalized alphabet keepsakes to continue appearing national publications throughout the year, and please subscribe to our blog if you haven’t yet. You’ll get an email every time it is updated.

Laying out the fleece

I want to share a story today. In case you’ve ever felt led to do something (or thought maybe you were being led but weren’t really sure), maybe this story will help you take that leap of faith.

I was sitting in our church on a cold Sunday in November 2006 listening to our pastor preach a sermon on giving. Knowing we hadn’t really been doing our part in the past two years, I was suddenly struck with a dollar figure in my head. A nice, round dollar figure I felt God wanted us to give in 2007. I won’t tell you the figure because that is unimportant. Suffice it to say it was more than we’d cumulatively given in our lives.

I had also been reading about sacrificial giving – where we give and because of that we actually forfeit something. Admittedly, it was something that wasn’t normal for us. We were used to giving a percentage of our income to a church (during some years when we felt we had the ability to do that). However, there were years we didn’t give anything at all, as we felt our finances were too tight.

So, when I got this figure placed in my brain, the first thing I wanted to do was to test God. I knew somewhere in the bible some Old Testament fellow had tested God, so I looked it up. It was Gideon, in Judges 6. You can read it if you want, but Gideon tested God twice, because he wasn’t quite sure if what God had instructed him to do was really the direction he was supposed to take.

If you read the chapter, you will know where the term “laying out the fleece” comes from. Early the next morning, a Monday, I woke up and I asked “God, if you really want us to give that amount in a single year please let me test you. Show me some kind of sign within 24 hours.” That’s how it went. Then I fell back asleep. That was probably 5:00AM.

Apparently, God felt my faith was a bit weak, so he needn’t wait too long. Five and a half hours, give or take. At about 10:30AM, my wife calls and says “Just got a call from the Today show, and they want to put us on and do a story about our business!” At this time, we had gotten virtually no national press, so this was a HUGE sign to me. It wasn’t like these calls were coming in every day.

At that point, I knew we were really called to give that amount. Either that or these were both coincidences. A skeptic can chalk it up to that, and that’s fine. Allow me to continue…

We went through the first part of 2007, always the slowest months of the retail season, and we didn’t give anything – maybe some small amounts here and there, but nothing near where we needed to be to keep on schedule. I wasn’t even sure we needed a schedule, as long as the amount was given by the end of the year. In fact, by May we had given less than 2% of our God-indicated goal for the year.

Let me back up a little bit. The year before, we had given a little money to Peoria Christian School. The school runs between a $250,000 and $300,000 deficit every year, as they are private. Tuition is the only source of revenue the school has, to my knowledge. We went to the elementary principal and told her we wanted her to contact us with any financial needs and not to be shy. The worst we could say is “we can’t give you that much, but would this help?” We also enjoy giving to smaller causes where our smaller amounts can really make a difference, and we can actually see the difference being made. Not to take away from anyone who give to large organizations – they need money too! It just wasn’t where we wanted to allocate most of our philanthropical dollars, especially when our daughters’ school is in such need year in and year out.

So, in our defense, during the first part of 2007, the principal didn’t ask us for much. In June, she asked for a more substantial amount for a project, and we gladly gave. A couple more months went by and by September we were still only about 10% of the way to our appointed goal. We went to our annual school fund-raising banquet in September, and after the banquet someone anonymously donated $100,000 to the school. It was the single, largest donation ever made to PCS. It was really inspiring to hear that from some of our co-workers the next day.

By October, we started picking up our giving, and it was amazing to think we could actually make our goal by the end of the year. We still weren’t sure, but we had faith. Literally within 60 days we had four huge PR releases – Rachael Ray in early October, the O List in mid-October, Martha Stewart in late October, and People magazine the last day of November. It was crazy and fun at the same time. We were able to make several larger donations to the school and to a friend’s ministry, with the largest coming the last week of the calendar year.

In all, we ended up not only meeting the goal but exceeding it by almost 50%. It was so incredible to be in the midst of it, because there were very few people who knew the story of how it was burned on my brain that day in November 2006. We never had so much fun writing out checks and just giving them away.

Anytime I look back and think ‘imagine what we could have done with that money” (which does happen from time to time), I come to my senses and realize we were stewards of that money during that time period to serve a greater purpose. It wasn’t ours before and it’s not ours now. However, being given the opportunity to be stewards of it provided the pleasure of seeing people’s faces light up.

While we’ve been able to support these Christian-based organizations, it has really caused us to focus our giving. We feel called to be faithful and continue in this direction.
I’m still waiting on our calling for this year, and though it hasn’t yet come in that same overwhelming feeling, we’re open and ready for what the rest of 2008 will bring.

Maybe our giving was sacrificial giving. At this point, we don’t know. I do know it’s made us more faithful and trusting than we ever were before, and whenever I speak to groups or individuals and give the details of this story, I get inspired all over again thinking about it.

A Return to the Live Music Scene

About 12 years ago I started playing music with a guy in Davenport, Iowa on the college music scene. We played a lot of grunge covers – Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Stone Temple Pilots. We played all acoustic guitars and I had a piano that I played on some of the songs. Our name was Those 2 Guys, which was kind of silly, though we liked seeing it up on the marquee.

When he moved away in 1997, I was out of the game for a while, only to return in late 2002 with a new threesome aptly called Those 3 Guys. We added a keyboard player but kept the moniker. When our keyboard player moved to Singapore (he is an attorney by day), and our drummer got worn out, I stopped playing music again. In fact, my wife bought me a brand new acoustic-electric guitar for Christmas in 2006, and I barely played it at all.

During this time, the company growth kept me so busy I couldn’t even think about getting back out on the scene, mainly because trying to coordinate practice and gig dates with 4 guys is a huge headache. There were 4 careers, 4 wives, 10 kids, and the schedules that come along with each of those.

Back in April, I got a call from a friend in Indianapolis who had heard us play a couple years before. He was having his annual Indy 500 and wanted me to bring my guitar and strum for the masses for a couple hours. I committed to it and then set out to learn about 50 songs by the end of May. It was no small task, but with Rick, an accomplished percussionist on his sophomore Indy 500 trip, we were able to entertain for a good 2 ½ hours the night before the race.

In June, the request was made to again bring the guitar to the campsite we were staying post-Jack Johnson in late June.

I knew I was a phone call away from getting an acoustic gig at a few local watering holes, so I booked a show. Tonight, I will be out in all my musical glory, back where I am extremely comfortable – on a stage playing guitar, piano, and singing my heart out. Only now, the setlist has progressed into Dave Matthews, Jack Johnson, O.A.R., BNL, and bands that weren’t around back in ’96 (well, DMB was just becoming popular at that time).

Rick, the skin-beater, will be joining be with an assortment of world percussive instruments (almost everything you can think of except a traditional drum set) and some really tight harmonies.

Two main questions I get asked are: 1) do you get nervous? Honestly, I really don't. I got really nervous the first time I played live with a guitar, only because it was a new instrument for me. I really look forward to it, and any anxious feelings I get are usually just wanting to get up there and play!

2) people ask me regularly if I write my own music, and the answer is no. Not only have I never written a song, but I haven’t yet had a real interest in writing one. I'm not confident it is something I would do very well at all, mostly from a chord arrangement standpoint. Lyrically, I would be fin, I believe. Mostly, I think it’s because I’m such a huge fan of music that I really just enjoying celebrating other people’s songs with my own renditions.

Family Tree made from the keepsakes!

Over the past two years, one of our customers has been building a “family tree” with our keepsakes. Back in 2006, they ordered their last name, and at some point over the next year they decided to make a family tree.


It’s been enjoyable to be a part of the completely unique way they are displaying their family tree. As you can see from the picture, when the family grows, they are going to have to find a new wall! Here is a picture of the hanging in progress:

If anyone is interested in building a family tree wall using our keepsakes, please let us know via email at sales@createsticksandstones.com. We can help keep things uniform from the get-go. You can certainly build it over time as budget allows!

Entrepreneur Photo Shoot

Back in April we found out we were going to be in the September issue of Entrepreneur Magazine, which is exciting for us. We got interviewed right away and then nothing happened for a while, so last week we got the email that they were coming to do a photo shoot for the issue, which sounded harmless enough, and even a bit exotic. In fact, I’d never been the subject of a legitimate (or illegitimate, for that matter) photo shoot before, though Jera has it mastered. She knows the stuff to wear, how much makeup to apply to herself, what can and can’t be airbrushed out, etc. Apparently, she missed the class on “where to put your hands during a photo shoot”, as she was corrected a number of times, but she had the rest of it pretty well mapped out.

Karyl, the photographer, called and we set it up for yesterday. I could tell from my phone conversation that I liked Karyl. She is cool! So, we got to the riverfront where she and her friend and fellow photographer Lisle were already setting up shots. Karyl has been doing photography for Entrepreneur for a few years, and she said two things we want to avoid are bright sunlight and wind. I assume rain also, but she never mentioned that. So, when we arrived to a sunny, windy riverfront, we knew we’d ultimately have to move.

Karyl was also determined to photograph us in a “letter” of some sort, which was a neat idea in principle, but proved tough to bring to fruition (is that grammatically correct?).

We first tried St. Mary’s Cathedral, site of a couple of our favorite letters, and while the grounds crew was wondering just what the heck was going on, Karyl was snapping away. Lisle was keeping busy telling Jera to move her hands and moving her hair around. I was sweating through my white, long-sleeved shirt. Every once in a while, she’d say “close your eyes and open them on 3”, because I tend to squint more than most people when I smile.

The ladies suggested we get the girls involved in the shoot, which wasn’t originally planned. So, we went home, got them ready, and headed to Detweiller Park, another site where we originally took a couple of pictures that are now letters on the website.

After a couple hours of shooting, I realized being a photographer of people is a tough job. Way tougher than taking still images. First of all, they take a few hundred shots to find a handful of good ones where all the subject people look as good as they can possibly look. The more people you add to the mix, the harder that is. The younger they are, the harder it is to get them to pay attention. All of this is going on and they are trying to get a good shot without it seeming too “posed”.

Also, the first time you are asked to be candid, you feel about as plastic as you can feel. At one point, Jera and I are walking toward the camera slowly, holding hands. I look at her with my painted-on smile only to legitimately break out in laughter at her painted-on smile and crazy eyes, which caused her to laugh. Hopefully, Karyl got the real laughter. Also, at one point she said “talk to each other,” at which time you realize you have nothing to say when you are put on the spot, so you start saying things like “bumblebee tuna, watermelon, cheesy poofs,” just to make it look like you are saying something.

Every time I hear a supermodel say “modeling is such hard work”, I laugh. Relatively speaking, it is a cakewalk compared to a person that actually has to work hard, like a ditch-digger, or a stay-at-home mom. However, I would not want to do this kind of thing every day. First of all, it is unnatural (as I stated above). Also, I don’t really like to see pictures of myself anyway. Although I like the idea of having our picture in a top-notch magazine like Entrepreneur or being on a TV show to talk about our product and business, I absolutely hate actually watching the show, and I dread seeing the magazine. I’ve personally made an appearance on The Big Idea four times, and I’ve only watched the first time. I’d had about enough of myself at that point. I can watch Jera all day long, and I’ve told her she is welcome to do these shows any time. I’d prefer to stay back and run the company, like I did during her Martha Stewart appearance.

About the only things I hate more than seeing pictures of myself is hearing myself on tape and seeing myself in action on video/TV. I know I am visibly uncomfortable in these situations, and I think just because it is so shocking to see yourself as others see you. The first thing my wife asks when she sees herself on video tapes is “Am I THAT annoying in real life?” at which point I pat her tiny head and say “No, you are not that annoying in real life at all.”

Anyway, Karyl and Lisle were delightful ladies who really enjoy themselves. They certainly had fun with us yesterday. At the end of the shoot, we all went to a “dunch” (I only use quotes because, unlike brunch, “dunch” has yet to attain mass appeal in the American lexicon) at Hooters on the riverfront. I was slightly uncomfortable amidst the hosiery, butt-cheek-short orangies, and midriff t-shirts, but the ladies seemed right at home munching on wings and quesadillas amidst this gaggle of scantily clad serving gals.

Here is a picture just after dunch, of Karyl (L) and Lisle (R) with Karyl’s newest possession, her very own Sticks and Stones!